I was helping a friend who Yahoo email account was hijacked and her password was changed. This is not a simple password like “Password.” When she called Yahoo, they offered to help her for a charge from $99 to change her password to $249 for a two year security package. She gave me a call and here’s what I did for free.

Yahoo email offers a service to recover your email service by sending a special text message code to you phone or by sending a link to your other email account. The problem was that she didn’t have text messaging on her phone and I didn’t know of any other email address she had. We fixed the problem by having her call her phone service and paying for text messaging and then we got the special code to change her password. I also set up a secondary Gmail email account so that it would also be an option.

The lessons learned are these:

Have text messaging turned on for your phone. Note I only pay for the text messages I receive – of course it different for every carrier.

Have your email account linked to that phone number.

Have a secondary email account.

Have your email account linked to that email address also.

Have a good security question and answer that the hackers won’t know the answer to.

As soon as you know your account is hacked you need to follow the above procedure to change your password.

Of course always have different passwords for each account so that if the bad guys figure out one account they won’t automatically know your other account.